Subscribe To

Saturday, July 25, 2009

Got some more time in on the ShipCamouflage database. The Farragut Class destroyer page is finally cleaned, linked and a design sheet added. One of the things I do is clean the code up; as the pages were originally created by an old version of Microsoft Front page, there is a lot of garbage code that does nothing (assigning a left align when that is the default anyway, for example) but cause longer download times. Even with adding all of the links in the page size dropped from about 15k to about 6k. Nothing of any concern for most internet users, but a bit of a point of pride to me.

I had also planned on folding in information from this document, 15-CN-41, which laid out plans for camouflage experiments in late 1941. That means that the Porter and Mahan class Destroyer pages have been updated as well. That also means I'll have to add descriptive pages for them at some point at Shipcamo.

That leaves just the Rudderow DE page to get cleaned and linked, and we're all done and can move on to correcting the database and tracking more design sheets down.

But there was a little bit of camouflage documentation, not a lot, but just enough to pique my interest in seeing what might else be there. Yesterday I finally got around to pulling the five boxes around those photos and looking through the first two of them at least, before I ran out of time. I found records covering 25 of the ships, which was enough in my opinion to finally start doing auxiliaries for ShipCamouflage.Com.

Behold the first page: Haskell Class APAs. As you can see, it's nowhere near done, but it's a credible start. For the most part it appears that the ships, when first commissioned, were in dazzle schemes, with the odd-numbered ships receiving Measure 32 Pattern 6A and the Even ships receiving Measure 32 Pattern 4T, but there are a few exceptions here and there. Later ships appear to have commissioned directly into Measure 21, and most were repainted as far as I can see in 1945 to Measure 21, with a few in Measure 22.

Sunday, July 5, 2009

I also updated some destroyer pages at ShipCamouflage.Com, including the Bagley, Dunlap, Gridley, and Mahan classes to include links to measures and design sheets we have. That leaves the Farragut class and one last DE class and then we can start looking through it and correcting errors... I'd also like to find more of the Benson class with the reversed pattern 1D.

Single Ship RDF is mostly finished and just needs some of the linking and proof-reading done. After that, maybe I'll finally get to the Kearny damage report I've been talking about for years now....